


Forgetting Any Other Home But This

by warbetweenfourwalls



Category: Glee
Genre: Blangst, Friends to Lovers, Kurt Hummel Stays at Dalton Academy, M/M, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Slow Burn, Vacation, World Travel, beginning to think this counts as
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-06
Updated: 2021-03-15
Packaged: 2021-03-17 20:47:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 19,825
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29231766
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/warbetweenfourwalls/pseuds/warbetweenfourwalls
Summary: In which Kurt and Blaine graduate from Dalton together and travel through Europe on their class trip. With their futures hanging over them, they have to figure out their priorities, and, more importantly, learn how to talk about them.
Relationships: Blaine Anderson/Kurt Hummel
Comments: 5
Kudos: 11





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This story is AU after 2.15--Kurt never left Dalton, and he and Blaine never actually had a conversation about their feelings. The McKinley kids are featured but not as heavily as I'd wish :(
> 
> Title from Romeo and Juliet.

In the heavy book of Rules And Guidelines For The Operation Of Insufferable Prep Schools that Kurt was sure existed in the basement of the world’s dustiest library, there was probably a whole chapter dedicated to the Mandatory End-Of-Senior-Year Trip. Every prep school Kurt had ever even heard of had one—and okay, maybe most of his understanding about prep schools came from _Maurice_ and _Dead Poets’ Society_ , and maybe he was making some slightly romantic generalizations, but it wasn’t like anyone at Dalton was working very hard to disabuse him of them.

Kurt couldn’t even bring himself to be cynical about the fact that this trip was little more than an opportunity for his trust-funded classmates to scout locations for future vacation houses; he’d never travelled outside the country before, but _God_ had he dreamed of it. And now, he would have two whole weeks touring the cities that had served as backdrops to his daydreams for years.

The unknowing star of Kurt’s more recent daydreams was practically vibrating with excitement in the chair next to him in the senior commons, where Dr. Pendergast had summoned them all to go over the pile of forms and information packets pertaining to the trip. Kurt glanced over at him, unable to stop the fond smile that bloomed across his face. All the capitals of Europe couldn’t begin to compare with the prospect of spending two whole weeks with Blaine.

It had been a strange year where Kurt’s friendship with Blaine was concerned. Ever since Kurt had decided not to return to McKinley for his senior year, they’d been totally inseparable—sitting together at meals, studying together, going to movies and Warbler practice—and it was addictive, the knowledge that he was _chosen_ , that everywhere they went, people looked at them and knew that _he_ was Blaine’s best friend. It was almost enough to satisfy the ache he had carried with him since the moment Blaine had taken his hand on that now-familiar staircase. Almost.

That had been the weird part. Kurt had never had real feelings for someone before—sure, there’d been embarrassing, short-lived crushes on the occasional straight boy, celebrities he’d privately found attractive, whatever—but this? Another gay boy who took him seriously and made him feel special and connected and safe? Kurt had no idea how to want this.

He’d been so lost in his thoughts that he didn’t realize that he was still smiling at Blaine, dopey and obvious. Some of the other boys were starting to notice. Of course, not Blaine, never Blaine, but out of the corner of his eye, Kurt could see Trent looking at him with one eyebrow raised while Nick and Jeff exchanged a smirk. He turned back towards the front of the room, and Blaine nudged him softly with his shoulder, having sensed the movement. Kurt looked back as innocently as he could, and Blaine gave him a fond smile of his own.

Those smiles were coming more frequently all the time, and Kurt had no idea what to make of them. He wanted to believe they meant something—that something had changed for Blaine since their last mortifying conversation about Kurt’s feelings—but honestly he wasn’t counting on it. Really, it was too good even to be possible.

Kurt snapped out of his thoughts when the stack of pamphlets making its way around the room hit the table in front of him. The picture on the first page showed a street somewhere, definitely European though not immediately recognizable, and the ordinariness of the scene made Kurt’s heart skip a beat. He could see himself walking down a street like this, eating at a café like the one in the corner of the shot, and it thrilled him to know that at least some part of his dreams would be a reality soon.

*

After the meeting, of which Kurt had absorbed thirty, maybe forty percent, he snapped a picture of the pamphlet and sent it to the New Directions group chat, captioning it with a row of exclamation points. Rachel and Mercedes immediately came back with excited responses, and Kurt grinned to himself. He still missed his friends, even if he did love it here.

“What are we smiling at?” Blaine was suddenly beside Kurt, angling his head to try to look at his phone. On instinct, Kurt clutched it to his chest like he had something to hide.

“Just texting the New Directions,” Kurt said, relaxing the hold on his phone so Blaine could see. “Showing off our plans.”

A grin took over Blaine’s face. “So you’re not upset about losing time with your friends this summer? We’ve only got a few weeks between the trip and NYU orientation.”

Kurt tensed a little at the mention of NYU, thinking of the pair of letters sitting at the back of his desk drawer, but he pushed his worry away and conjured up a smile. “Are you kidding? This is going to be terrific. Hanging out with you—” He paused when Blaine raised his eyebrows. “I mean, uh, you guys. The Warblers. You’re my friends too. And Europe! God, I can’t wait.” He resisted slapping a hand over his mouth to stop the word vomit.

Blaine somehow managed to smile even bigger. “Right? I’m so excited.” He glanced down at Kurt’s phone, which Kurt was still holding out for him to see. “Uh, Kurt? What does Santana mean when she says ‘are you and the hobbit finally going to f—’”

Kurt jerked his phone away. “Nothing! I’m sure it’s just Santana, being—well, you know.” He tried for a casual grin and stuffed his phone in his pocket. He got up and started gathering his things.

“Right, okay.” Blaine was frowning a little. “Speaking of the New Directions, have you heard back about who’s coming to the graduation party?”

It was times like these that Kurt was grateful for the way Blaine always let things fly past him. Sure, he’d missed every single neon sign that Kurt had practically thrown his way about his feelings, but at least Kurt never had to explain anything uncomfortable. “I think so,” he said. “Mike and Tina are coming, and I know Rachel has already been texting you about singing a duet—”

Blaine grimaced at that, and Kurt smiled with no small amount of Schadenfreude before rattling off everyone else’s plans. When he finished, Blaine gave him that polite look that said he wouldn’t remember any of this in ten minutes. Kurt rolled his eyes. “Most of them are coming,” he summarized.

“Terrific,” Blaine said, and the crazy part was he probably meant it.

“Why do I get the feeling that one day, my friends are going to steal you from me?”

“As if they could.” Blaine wrapped a friendly arm around Kurt’s shoulders, and Kurt tried not to melt into the touch. “Now come on,” he continued. “You promised to help me study for the AP exam, and I refuse to take calculus again in New York.”

Kurt withheld a sigh. Another reference to New York. As he followed Blaine out of the commons, Kurt tried to imagine what it would be like when he told him that their plans might not go the way Blaine was hoping.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm just going to go ahead and post this now, since it's ready and also kind of short. Expect chapter 3 on Friday!

The weeks between that first informational meeting and graduation flew by for Blaine. He passed all of his exams, even (he hoped) the AP exam, he spent long afternoons with the Warblers, and he spent most nights and every possible weekend with Kurt. He even convinced Kurt to skip class with him one day and instead of going to the mall like they’d planned, they had driven to Alum Creek Park and gone swimming; the water was  _ freezing, _ but Kurt had laughed at him the whole time and they’d cuddled in the back seat of the car to warm up afterwards, and they were both so  _ happy.  _ Blaine had considered telling Kurt how he felt then and there, but it would’ve messed with his Big, Romantic European Plans, and he was actually quite attached to those.

And then there had been graduation, and Kurt, the deserving valedictorian, had given  _ that speech, _ full of wit and honesty and honest-to-god  _ wisdom _ , and Blaine had been knocked off his feet all over again. He’d watched with tears in his eyes as Kurt ended the speech by saying, “I was scared, when I came here, of everything it meant to be who I was. I thought that because I was different, I might never find a place I belonged. I thought that  _ belonging  _ and  _ fitting in _ were the same thing. ” Then, he’d lifted his chin and looked right at Blaine in the front row. “Thank you for teaching me the difference, and thank you for making me a man.”

That had been two days ago and Blaine still felt a sting behind his eyes just thinking about it. He forced himself to blink the feeling away, and then he straightened his favorite special-occasion bowtie in the hall mirror before heading into the living room to face the party.

Ostensibly, this was a Warbler graduation party, but Blaine’s parents were hosting and had paid for everything, so it was kind of Blaine’s graduation party. As best he could tell, the extravagance was to make up for the fact that his dad had almost missed the ceremony for some work thing, and the crush of well-wishing friends and family only served as a reminder of that. He was happy to see most of them, at least. Cooper had made the trip up from LA, and his mom’s sister had come all the way from Manila for the ceremony, with plans to stay through July. Blaine hadn’t seen her since he was eight, maybe nine, but she was sweet and the meals she convinced his mom to cook with her always smelled and tasted delicious.

Blaine made his way through the crowd with as much ease and charm as he could muster. His parents' friends, most of whom he’d seen once, twice at most, slipped him checks as they congratulated, which would have been more awkward if he hadn’t decided ahead of time that more money meant more opportunities to give Kurt the vacation of a lifetime. Speaking of Kurt, a group of his McKinley friends, including Rachel and Mercedes, were huddled together at the far end of the room, looking around with wide eyes. Blaine approached them cheerfully.

“Kurt never mentioned you were loaded,” Puck said instead of greeting him.

“It figures, though,” Quinn shot back. “Prep school.”

“You say this like you don’t live in a McMansion.”

Blaine figured it would be best to get straight to the point before the bickering really got started. “Has anyone seen Kurt?”

“He said he was running late,” Mercedes said. “Some kind of layering emergency?”

Blaine couldn’t help the smile that broke out across his face at the thought of Kurt, still at home, going between his favorite waistcoats and scarves with that wide-eyed look that Blaine secretly found endearing. He tried to cover it up, but based on her raised eyebrows, Mercedes had definitely clocked it.

“Okay, well, when he gets here, tell him to come find me.” Blaine turned to continue his rounds, but he hadn’t taken five steps before he felt someone touch his arm. It was Rachel.

“Blaine, do you have a second?” she asked.

“Uh, sure, but if this is about that duet—”

“It’s not about the duet,” she assured him. “It’s about Kurt. Do you know if he’s decided yet? He won’t tell me anything.”

Blaine frowned. “Decided?”

“About where he’s going in the fall.” Rachel gave him a look like he should know what she was talking about.

“What are you talking about, Rachel? He’s coming to NYU with me. We’ve been talking about it for ages.”

“Oh, okay. I just know that he got into Pratt, too, but if you guys have been talking about it recently, then you probably know more than I do.”

“Wait a second, Kurt got into Pratt?” Blaine knew he had applied, and that it had been his top choice, but when he’d asked Kurt about it once acceptances started coming in, Kurt had brushed it off, and Blaine had just assumed that he had been rejected or waitlisted and didn’t want to talk about it. Apparently, that wasn’t the case.

Rachel’s eyebrows shot up. “Didn’t he tell you?”

“No,” he replied, trying not to sound upset. “I don’t think he mentioned it.”

“Oh. That’s weird.” Now Rachel was frowning.

“Yeah.”  _ Why wouldn’t Kurt tell him about this? _

Rachel, blissfully self-involved, was already moving on to her next thought, her next move—Blaine could see when she noticed someone on the other side of the room. “Okay, well, anyway, if it comes up, tell him I wish he’d tell me what’s going on.”

“Yeah, of course.”

Once Rachel walked off, Blaine looked around for a place where he could sit and process, undisturbed. Everywhere he checked—the piano in the corner of the room, the hallway leading to the guest bathroom, the path to the stairs—was teeming with potential well-wishers, people who might get concerned if they noticed the bewildered look that he couldn’t school back into a smile. He didn’t know what he was supposed to do with his hands. Suddenly, of all people, Kurt was approaching him. “Blaine?” he asked. “Is everything alright?”

Blaine blinked, coming back to himself a little bit. Kurt was watching him with a concerned look on his face, and distantly Blaine noticed that he had decided on a trim dark waistcoat over a short-sleeved button-up, one of Blaine’s favorites. He looked good. He looked like Blaine’s future, or at least what he’d thought was his future. Maybe he’d been wrong this whole time—about everything.

“Blaine?” Kurt repeated.

Blaine finally mustered up enough of a smile to feel convincing. “Yeah, sorry, just—it’s a lot of people, you know.”

“Right.” Kurt didn’t look like he totally believed him.

“I was actually just talking about our plans for the fall with Rachel,” Blaine ventured. He would give Kurt one more chance to come clean. “At NYU, you know. She doesn’t think we should room together, but you’ll be the only person I know, and—”

“Don’t listen to her,” Kurt interjected, and this time Blaine didn’t miss the way his features tightened. “We’re going to be the most fabulous roommates in the whole city, and it won’t even feel like living in a dorm.”

Blaine refused to let the disappointment show on his face. “Even with so little closet space?” he asked in a surprisingly sure voice.

“Even then. Come on.” Kurt hooked his arm through Blaine’s. “Let’s enjoy your party now, and worry about how much of your closet I’m going to need later.”

This startled a genuine laugh out of Blaine, who followed Kurt willingly into the fray, like always.

*

A week later, Blaine and Kurt and the rest of the senior class were thirty thousand feet over the Atlantic Ocean. From his window seat, Blaine peeked down over the clouds, wishing they were close enough to give him some sense of how fast the plane was moving. Kurt’s head was heavy on his shoulder.

They still hadn’t talked about things; Blaine thought that they probably should, but he wasn’t ready to hear that Kurt had plans that didn’t include him, or, worse yet, that Kurt was thinking about giving up a place at his dream school to honor his plans with Blaine. Blaine had pretty much decided that he would wait to mention it until they were back from the trip, so that even if they wouldn’t spend the next four years together, he could at least have the next two weeks.

He glanced over at Kurt, who was only sleeping because of the dramamine he’d taken before liftoff. His face was open and vulnerable, like it almost never was in waking. Blaine sighed, and smiled, and leaned his head on top of Kurt’s. Whatever this beautiful, incredible boy could give him, Blaine would happily accept.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hope you enjoyed! comments/kudos are obviously appreciated


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kurt and Blaine's first day in Italy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I'm a few days late, but hopefully the fact that this chapter is twice as long as the others makes up for it a little bit!
> 
> This chapter contains a vague description of the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian.

The Roman airport was possibly the busiest, sweatiest place that Kurt had ever been, including the locker rooms at McKinley, but he barely even cared because this was  _ Rome,  _ the Eternal City, home of Popes and Emperors and setting of the  _ Lizzie McGuire  _ movie (among other, equally beloved classics.) Somehow, even this awful airport held a sort of ancient mystique. Like any airport, it was full of families with screaming children, people talking too loudly on cell phones, and haggard-looking people in airport uniforms trying to direct traffic and answer questions, all while being drowned out by the looping announcement track playing over the PA system. Still, Kurt thought he caught a whiff of sun-baked air, and the morning sun was streaming through the skylights, and he could just  _ feel _ that he was in Italy.

They weren’t the only school group—there were a couple of swarms of uniformed children, mostly younger than him, probably Catholic school kids—and the security agents they had to pass by were friendly enough, considering how many of them there were. Kurt stuck near Blaine the whole time, and Blaine seemed to be sticking near him too, so they managed to make it out of the building with the rest of the group.

Before the plane had landed, Kurt had woken up burrowed against Blaine’s neck, warm and happy and initially a little confused. It had reminded him of that time they’d fallen asleep watching a movie in Blaine’s room at the end of junior year and woken up the next morning in wrinkled uniforms, warm from their shared body heat. There had been a moment, then, maybe even a Moment, when they were lying nose-to-nose, and Blaine had looked at him with an unguarded intensity that would have knocked Kurt’s knees out from under him if he had been standing. Kurt had stared back, half-afraid and half-dreaming, and it was a long, tense moment before either boy looked away. They hadn’t talked about it since; quite frankly, Kurt wasn’t sure there was anything to talk about. It had probably just been his imagination.

Regardless, Kurt had been very careful about falling asleep around Blaine since then. Waking up on the plane had been awkward because Kurt couldn’t move without waking Blaine up as well, and so there had been a good five minutes where he’d just sat there, staring at a loose thread on the collar of Blaine’s t-shirt and trying to decide if there was a non-awkward way out of this position. Signs pointed to no.

In the van that took them from the airport to the hotel, Kurt stayed very resolutely awake, but it wasn’t hard because there was a whole new country on the other side of the window glass. Sure, it looked a lot like America, with shopping centers and road construction and the long, sun-bleached stretch of highway in front of them, but there was something about the way the light caressed every surface it touched. Kurt could close his eyes and know he was somewhere else just by breathing. He wondered if he’d ever be able to explain it.

Gradually, he started to feel like someone was watching him. He turned around, and, sure enough, Blaine was looking back at him with a distracted little smile on his face. His eyes were almost sad. Kurt frowned minutely, sure that Blaine would be able to translate the expression.  _ What’s wrong? _

Blaine huffed dismissively and looked away, his response as clear as if he’d said it out loud.  _ Nothing. Don’t worry about it. _

Kurt had stopped buying that act sometime in the beginning of their senior year, when Blaine had been fighting with his dad and didn’t think anyone could tell. Still, he knew that trying to force him to talk about whatever it was would likely prove counterproductive. He resolved at least to keep an eye on Blaine.

*

Believe it or not, trying to herd fifty-three eighteen-year-old boys around one of the oldest and most important cities in the world was not all romance and light. Prep school boys, Kurt had learned, were only as put-together as they seemed when they were in uniform, and sometimes not even then. The infamous Warbler Blowout of 2011 was proof enough of that. Kurt still couldn’t shower without looking over his shoulder first. In Italy, the Dalton boys were jubilantly rambunctious, as if they all thought this was their last real chance to be kids. Kurt, for the most part, abstained from the nonsense and the noise, choosing to stay in the room he was sharing with Jeff, Nick, and Blaine to unpack instead of joining everyone else as they terrorized the hotel patrons. As he laid the first of his shirts for tomorrow out on the complementary ironing board, he heard the thunder of footsteps and the voices of at least three guys, presumably running some kind of race. Kurt thought he recognized one of the voices—Thad, maybe. A few minutes later, his ironing was interrupted again when Blaine burst into the room.

“Hey, we were—” he stopped in his tracks when he saw Kurt. “Are you  _ ironing _ ?”

“Do you think I’m going to wear wrinkled clothes on this trip?”

“Kurt, we’re in  _ Italy _ . A couple of us were going to run down to the gelato shop across the street before dinner, and I was going to invite you to join us, but now I’m forcing you, because I refuse to let you stay in here playing housewife during our first night in Europe.” He held out a hand to take, and Kurt considered his iron.

“Fine,” he said after a pause that was mostly for effect. “Let me unplug this and let’s get going.”

Blaine continued to hold out his hand until Kurt was ready to go, and Kurt only hesitated a moment before taking it. Blaine was so casual and generous with his touch—it had been hard to get used to, and Kurt still felt a thrill in his gut when their palms touched.

Gelato (delicious) was followed by dinner (overwhelming, but also delicious), and before Kurt knew it, he was lying in the hotel bed next to Blaine, listening to his breathing and trying not to have some sort of fit. Distantly, he marveled at the fact that he hadn’t been forced to sleep on the floor, or in another room, like he would have been if this was a McKinley trip, but he was also incredibly, agonizingly aware of the long, hot line of Blaine’s body just inches from his. Maybe the floor would have been preferable to this. Suddenly the hotel bed, which had seemed an enormous luxury when they first got to the room, felt as narrow as a twin; Kurt felt like he couldn’t move without some part of him brushing up against Blaine’s arm or knee or—Kurt stopped himself from thinking further.

Blaine hummed in his sleep and turned towards Kurt, reaching out and resting a hand mere inches from Kurt’s shoulder. His face was sweet and earnest, even in sleep, but also open in a way that it never was in waking; he worked so hard at making people think he was this confident, easy-going guy, but Kurt knew better by now.

He realized he was staring, and even though no one else was awake to catch him, he still felt distinctly creepy. He flipped onto his side, facing away from Blaine, and let the exhausting day he’d had wash over him and pull him towards sleep.

Right as he dropped off into oblivion, he said to himself,  _ How on earth are you going to keep this up? _

*

Their first full day in Rome was blisteringly hot; even in a pair of linen shorts and a short-sleeved cotton button-up, Kurt was roasting.

Breakfast was a delectable spread of bread and meat and cheese in the hotel’s specially-appointed breakfast room, and it was worlds nicer than the cup of yogurt and stale bagel one might expect from even some of the nicer hotels in America. Blaine got pulled into some kind of conversation about gladiators (or possibly just the Russell Crowe movie?) almost as soon as they left the room, so Kurt sat with David and Thad and Jeremy, who he had English with but didn’t know very well otherwise.

After breakfast, they piled into vans that took them to the city center, and they toured the Colosseum and the Forum both before lunchtime. The whole time, Kurt was in awe of how  _ old  _ everything was; if he ran his hand over the side of a column, he was touching the same stone as someone who had done the same thing thousands of years ago. When he looked out over the tiers of the Colosseum, he could imagine rows and rows of spectators, as densely packed as any modern concert. It was heady and overwhelming and Kurt barely even cared that Blaine always seemed to be with some other group, or looking at something else, or trying to talk to the tour guide in his spotty Italian, or just generally keeping himself busy when otherwise he might have hovered closeby.

By lunchtime, when Blaine very deliberately chose another table to sit at but spent the meal watching Kurt with big, sad eyes, Kurt was starting to suspect something was off. He made a point to climb into the same van as Blaine for the ride to the catacombs at the basilica of Saint Sebastian and sit next to him on the back bench.

“So I’m sorry if this comes off as kind of clingy or whatever,” he began, “and I’m probably imagining it, but are you…avoiding me?” Kurt tried to keep the hurt out of his voice and expression. The results were more than likely mixed.

Blaine smiled too brightly at him, like he was about to deny it, but he gave up before the smile was even finished. “I’m sorry, Kurt. I’ve been kind of—in my head about something the last few days, when I should be enjoying the rest of our time together.”

“You say that as if we don’t have much left,” Kurt said, unable to control the frown that took over his face.

“Ugh, I didn’t mean—” Blaine ran a hand over his face. “Ignore me. I promise I’m just being dumb. I just—” He cut himself off with a sigh and looked over at Kurt helplessly.

“It’s okay,” Kurt said, and maybe it could be. “As long as you stop it. You are my favorite thing about this trip, and I don’t think I would enjoy it without you.”

Blaine scoffed. “This is  _ Europe _ , Kurt. You’ve been wanting to visit since before you even knew me.”

“I know.”

Blaine gave him a confused little smile, eyebrows drawn, and it took all of Kurt’s courage to hold his gaze. Something passed between them there; Kurt couldn’t begin to guess what Blaine saw in his face.

Kurt only realized how intense the moment had been after it was over, and the chaperone was hustling them out of the parked van and into the basilica. Blaine kept a hand on the back of Kurt’s shoulder, making a point to stay close.

The interior was dim and cool compared to the blazing Roman sunshine, though it was still uncomfortably humid. Every rustle of fabric, every footstep echoed up to the painted ceiling, and the ornate moulding gleamed in the soft light. Kurt was suddenly desperate to take it all in—the artwork, the atmosphere, the silence so great it quieted Kurt’s heart as well.

He was looking at a statue of a man, lying prostrate with golden arrows sticking out of him at the altar in the first chapel when Blaine came up behind him and whispered in his ear. “That’s Saint Sebastian. The church’s patron saint.”

“Why is it so…” Kurt tried to think of a way to describe how the man was stretched out on the marble base—curls streaming over the fabric of his robe, hands and feet placed just so—

“Horny?” Blaine supplied, smirking as Kurt covered a laugh.

“Exactly.”

Blaine came around to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Kurt. “He’s kind of a gay icon, actually.”

Kurt’s eyebrows shot up. “Oh?”

“I did some reading before we left. Sebastian was basically undercover in the Roman army, working to—I don’t know—convert people, or whatever, but then one day someone discovered him, and they tried to execute him by, like, ancient firing squad. He survived, though, and immediately went to confront the emperor, who was surprised to see him alive—”

“I would imagine,” Kurt remarked.

“—but then he ordered him beaten to death.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. Anyway, I guess people saw the parallels between being ‘outed’ as a Christian and being ‘outed’ as a gay man, but personally, I just think that a bunch of Renaissance artists thought the concept of someone getting tied to a tree and shot with a bunch of arrows had the potential to be really sexy.”

Kurt laughed. “It’s…it’s a beautiful statue.”

“Sometimes I think about the artists who made works like these, giving so much love and attention to the beauty of other men. Just—knowing there were people like us out there, even hundreds of years ago.”

“It’s kind of comforting,” Kurt offered.

“Kind of, yeah.” Blaine peaked over at Kurt. “‘ _ Someone, I tell you, will remember us, even in another time. _ ’”

Kurt imagined the man who carved the statue, and the model, and the love that traced along every line and contour of the piece.  _ Someone will remember us. _ “Is that from something?”

“Sappho,” Blaine said.

“Since when do you know so much about ancient history, huh?”

“Like I said, I did some reading,” Blaine replied. There was a beat of silence before he added, “I might have been trying to impress you.”

“Oh.” Kurt turned from the statue and found Blaine looking resolutely ahead. “Well, consider me impressed.”

Blaine smiled a little and ducked his head, but didn’t say anything else.

*

The catacombs were dark and almost cold; Kurt regretted leaving his sweater at the hotel. Silence had fallen over the group as they listened to their guide explain that the catacombs had been used as meeting places for ancient Christians, and Kurt started to wonder if there hadn’t been other secret meetings down here—lovers, perhaps. He imagined himself coming of age in the middle ages, slipping into the darkness to meet a boy he couldn’t even look at in the light of day. Would this have been a safe place for them?

He glanced at Blaine and caught him glancing back. Hopefully, his blush wouldn’t be visible in the flickering light coming from the fixture overhead.

“Kurt…” Blaine murmured, but Kurt couldn’t bring himself to look back. He felt fingers brushing against the back of his wrist, and then Blaine took his hand.

Kurt tried to keep from gasping aloud, even as his heart skipped a beat. He didn’t let go for the rest of the tour, sure that no one would notice in the darkness of the tunnel.

*

Once they were back in daylight, Kurt couldn’t shake the phantom feeling of Blaine’s hand in his. He didn’t know what it meant, or how to ask about it. He only knew that it was a matter of time before he couldn’t keep his feelings to himself; however, he was beginning to believe that it might not be such a bad thing. They were in Europe, staring out at the rest of their lives. Maybe this was the perfect time to say something.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The statue that Kurt and Blaine are looking at is Saint Sebastian by Giuseppe Giorgetti.


	4. Chapter 4

Blaine was slowly losing his mind. On one hand, he’d already wasted so much time avoiding Kurt, but on the other, he didn’t know how to be around him while his feelings were such a jumbled, emotional mess. Who knows what Kurt had made of the hand-holding in the catacombs, or how Blaine was going to be able to sleep next to him now that he didn’t have post-flight exhaustion on his side.

For now, they were sitting next to each other at dinner, and Blaine barely enjoyed his fettuccine alfredo. Well, that was a lie; it was delicious and Blaine loved every bite, but he probably could have loved it more, given it the attention it deserved, if he hadn’t been kind of entranced by the flush spreading high across Kurt’s cheeks, either from the warmth of the candles on their table or the small glass of wine they’d been allowed as an aperitif. They were sharing a table with Thad and a couple of his lacrosse buddies, so Kurt wasn’t too active in the conversation, but every so often he would shoot Blaine a look that said something like _Straight boys, am I right?_ and it made Blaine feel like the luckiest guy in the world.

He could drown in that feeling and die happy, but a voice in the back of his head kept reminding him how fleeting this all might be, and how much it was going to hurt if Kurt left, or if he didn’t want this like Blaine did.

He shook his head to clear it. He’d promised himself he wouldn’t think like this, at least not until they got back to Ohio. And besides, hadn’t Kurt basically just told him that he was his favorite thing about the trip? That wasn’t something someone said if they were planning to completely abandon someone else.

When he looked back up, Kurt was watching him with a little bit of concern in his eyes. Blaine gave him a look that he hoped would keep him from worrying. Kurt’s frown deepened for a fraction of a second, but he didn’t press further.

Their dessert (the best tiramisu Blaine had ever tasted) was eventually interrupted by Nick, who appeared out of pretty much nowhere and put his arms around their shoulders. “Warbler party in my room tonight, lads,” he said in the fake British accent he’d been using all day. He broke out of it to add, “Jeff bought a whole bunch of really good wine on the cheap—did you know they don’t even card people here?” 

Kurt and Blaine exchanged a look. “Isn’t your room also _our_ room, Nicholas?” Blaine asked.

“Oh, right—that’s why Jeff said to ask you guys first, then. Okay, well, I hope it’s cool because I ran into David on the way over here and he’s definitely gonna tell everyone else.”

Blaine looked back to Kurt, feeling apologetic on Nick’s behalf. Kurt just rolled his eyes. “I don’t think Jeff would know good wine if it bit him on the ass,” he said. “But I suppose if it really gets unbearable, I can go read my book in the lobby.”

Nick fist pumped and smacked a kiss on Kurt’s cheek from which Kurt, to his credit, only flinched away minutely. Blaine knew it was still hard for him to welcome unexpected physical contact, but the Warblers had worked hard for the last two years to find ways to express their affection for him that made him comfortable, and it had been gratifying to watch as he learned to return that affection even in the form of hugs and affectionate jostling and hands on shoulders in the halls. He’d always been easy about touch with Blaine, but it seemed like he was slowly getting more comfortable with the rest of the world.

“Are you sure you’re okay with this?” Blaine asked once Nick had moved on to the next table. “We can always tell them to get lost.”

“I don’t know. It could be fun,” Kurt said. “Are you okay with it?” There was a note of a challenge in his voice.

“Oh, yeah. You know me.”

“I definitely do.” Kurt was smirking.

Blaine immediately realized what he was talking about and groaned. “Oh my God, shut up.”

“I completely respect your right to express yourself, Blaine,” Kurt said, taking a prim sip of his after-dinner coffee. “There’s probably a special NEA grant for half-naked foam parties.”

“I hate you.” Blaine pressed the heels of his hands into his eye sockets, trying to force back the memory of that cold, slippery ambulance ride.

“Oh, come on. _Now_ you have shame?”

They dissolved into giggles after that, and the rest of the meal passed happily, with the two of them in their own little bubble.

*

By the time they got back to the hotel room after dinner, there were already about ten Warblers passing around a bottle of merlot and singing Just Give Me A Reason in four parts. Blaine made them wait outside the door until the beginning of the second verse, so he could break in with the Nate Ruess part, and Kurt rolled his eyes when the group adapted to this perfectly, like he wished he could be surprised. Even after two years, Blaine still thought there was no feeling on earth that compared to getting a reaction out of Kurt with a performance.

Kurt and Blaine were nearly the last to arrive—in the end, there were fifteen boys besides them, and all but two were Warblers. Half an hour after he got there, Blaine was on his third plastic hotel cup of merlot and beating everyone at a complicated version of musical signs that they’d made up on the bus to regionals two years ago when Nick said, “God, can you believe it? Every night is going to be like this once we’re in college.”

A cheer went up around the room, and for a moment, Blaine could picture it: meeting new people, going to parties, being loud and silly and untroubled, and Kurt, always Kurt, sitting beside him and smiling into his cup, laughing with him and at him and leaning up against him as the night wore on towards morning—he could close his eyes and it would be like he was already there.

Not necessarily, of course. He looked over at Kurt, unable to keep the sadness from his eyes. “What is it?” Kurt asked.

“You always know when there’s something wrong,” Blaine muttered, almost entirely to himself, but he was more than a little drunk, so of course Kurt heard him.

“Only when it’s you, B, and only because you’re so bad at hiding your emotions.”

“I am not.”

“Oh, aren’t you? I’m sorry, am I still talking to Blaine “Gap Attack” Anderson?”

“It doesn’t count when I’m saying how I feel on purpose!”

Kurt knocked their shoulders together. “Stop avoiding the question. What’s bothering you?”

Blaine sighed and dropped his forehead against Kurt’s shoulder.

“Blaine?” Kurt’s hand came into his field of vision and pushed a stray bit of hair behind Blaine’s ear. He wanted to melt into the touch

“Is it really going to be just like this in college?”

Kurt shrugged as best he could with Blaine still leaning against his shoulder. “I mean, I think so.”

Blaine couldn’t help but doubt the words when Kurt wouldn’t look at him as he said them. He straightened up to put a little bit of distance between them. “Are we going to be just like this in college?” he asked.

“I don’t know.” Kurt still didn’t look at him. “People change. Relationships change.”

“I don’t want us to change. You’re my best friend.”

“And you’ll always be mine,” Kurt promised, finally, _finally_ looking at him with lovely and confused eyes. “What’s got you so worried, anyway?”

“Am I holding you back?”

“Blaine, what—?” Kurt’s concerned outburst was interrupted by Nick, who lifted his Italian burner phone over his head and actually _crowed_ before Jeff and a couple of others shushed him, giggling.

“What’s going on?” Blaine leaned away from Kurt to try and get a look at whatever was on Nick’s phone.

“We have to go!” Nick was saying to Jeff. “You have to come with me—we have to sneak out!”

“Yes!” someone else said, “and you need to sing to her—we should all—”

Blaine didn’t need to hear anything else after “sing to her.” Romantic serenades were his catnip. Kurt must have known that too, because he sighed and stopped trying to get his attention.

The next thing Blaine knew, they were slipping quietly through the lobby in groups of three or four, giggling and generally failing in their attempts to look like they weren’t sneaking out. He was pretty sure he saw Jeff slip the night manager fifty euros. Once they were outside, Nick led the way down a series of narrow streets, and Blaine managed to gather that he’d met some girl during one of their tours earlier that day and exchanged numbers with her, and the reason he’d started yelling while they were in the hotel room was because she’d given him her address and told him to come over. The group almost certainly got lost at several points, because Blaine was pretty sure they’d passed what Nick eventually identified as the entrance to the girl’s neighborhood at least two times before they used it. Blaine and David trailed behind Nick the whole way discussing song choices, and there was a brief period where Blaine tried to teach Nick the words to the only Italian song he knew that almost certainly contributed to their getting lost the second time. Kurt was always nearby—Blaine made sure of it, holding onto his arm and pulling him along when he started to lag behind—rolling his eyes and muttering things about “dramatic straight boys” but looking generally excited anyway.

Once they were in front of the girl’s house, David set the pitch for Billy Joel’s “For The Longest Time,” which was well within the group’s wheelhouse. Even while most of them were still at least tipsy, it sounded pretty good, and Blaine was sure they looked charming, standing below this girl’s window and doing their little two-step choreography.

The girl appeared somewhere around the second chorus, laughing and shushing them. She pulled Nick into a kiss, and the whole group burst into cheers, only to be shushed again. Blaine looked over at Kurt, beaming, and Kurt just shook his head fondly.

“I should have figured this would happen at least once,” he said.

“It’s only the second night,” Blaine pointed out. “Knowing these guys, we’ll sing to a different girl in every country.”

“You say this like you aren’t part of the problem,” Kurt replied, now actively fighting back a smile. “God, what would Wes think?”

“Probably that we’re amazing and inspired.”

The smile finally won out on Kurt’s face. “Probably.”

*

It took about five minutes to figure out that they couldn’t actually leave Nick here, since he was the one with the map saved on his phone, and also they all needed to get back to the hotel before someone noticed they were missing, and so while the serenade had been romantic, it couldn’t actually lead to anything. Nick and the girl were both devastated, but they made promises to meet each other after the next day’s Vatican tour before the group set off in the direction from which they’d come.

Kurt caught Blaine by the elbow as soon as the hotel came into view, and held him there until they were a little ways behind the group. “Before I forget,” he said, “why did you ask me, earlier, if you were holding me back?”

Blaine closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “I don’t know. I was—a lot drunker than I am now, and I just—” He really didn’t want to have to explain himself, and so he fixed Kurt with pleading eyes. “I don’t know.”

Kurt frowned at him, and looked like he wanted to say something, but Blaine stopped him before he could.

“Look, can we just go to bed? We’re losing enough sleep as it is.”

With a sigh, Kurt acquiesced, and Blaine led them both into the hotel.

*

Twenty minutes later, they were both in bed, and Blaine at least was pretending to be asleep. His mind was buzzing, though, and he didn’t expect actual sleep to come for quite a while. What _had_ he meant when he’d asked if he was holding Kurt back?

The obvious answer had lingered at the back of his awareness for over a week now: even if Kurt went to NYU with him in the fall and kept all his promises about the two of them staying together, Blaine would always worry that he’d stopped him from going after what he’d really wanted. A part of Blaine wished there was a way to need him less, to be okay with whatever parts of his future Kurt was willing to share. He knew they needed to talk about this—he couldn’t really know what Kurt’s plans were unless he asked—but the prospect was daunting. He didn’t know if he could control his response enough to keep from making Kurt feel guilty or trapped. Would it make it better or worse if Kurt knew the truth about his feelings?

Blaine wasn’t sure how much time passed while he turned those thoughts over in his head, but at some point he fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.

*

The next morning they had to leave the hotel at an ungodly hour to make it to their Vatican tour, and so even though Blaine felt like someone had dropped an anvil on his head during the night, and his mouth tasted like something had died in it, he and Kurt were both up early enough to see the sun rise over the city. They crept around the room for a half hour to keep from waking Nick and Jeff while they took care of their hair and skincare regimens. They were better at sharing a mirror than Blaine had expected, and even though they were both grouchy, they managed a relatively smooth dance.

The ride towards Vatican city was quiet and grim, mostly due to the hour, but at least none of the chaperones seemed to suspect anything about their hangovers. There was plenty of coffee to go around, and soon they were huddled around their guide in the Piazza San Pietro. Blaine couldn't take his eyes off the stately facade of the basilica. It was more like a temple than a church, or maybe a palace. In a way, it was all three, and Blaine had never felt more religious in his life.

“Can you believe we’re in a different country now?” Kurt asked. “It seems almost absurd.”

“It feels like a different country, though,” Blaine replied, “or maybe a different universe, honestly.”

“It is pretty incredible. I bet this isn’t even the most amazing part, though.”

*

Kurt ended up being right, of course. Their first tour stop was not inside the basilica itself but through the Vatican museums, including several courtyards full of statuary that Blaine could have spent hours looking at if he’d been left to his own devices; Kurt looked like he wanted to live there. Blaine mindlessly snapped pictures of as many beautiful things as he could, vowing to look at them more closely when he had the time. 

They passed through some of the old papal apartments and stopped for a good fifteen minutes in front of Raphael’s _School Of Athens_ , which Blaine knew well from every history textbook he’d ever used. Here, though, it was massive, taking up an entire wall and generally pulling focus from the other three walls.

Beside him, Kurt was similarly awestruck.

“Maybe we should be Catholic,” Blaine whispered to him.

Kurt huffed out a little laugh. “Because they’re so much more accepting of gays than your average Ohio Methodist.”

“I mean most of these guys played for our team,” Blaine pointed out, gesturing to the painting at large. “Socrates is over there with his boyfriend, see?”

“More of your research?” Kurt glanced over at him with a raised eyebrow.

Blaine just grinned shamelessly at him. “Something like that. Speaking of fun facts, though, do you see that guy in the front sitting in the ‘thinker’ pose?”

“That guy?” Kurt pointed at the correct figure.

Blaine nodded. “That’s supposed to be Michelangelo as the philosopher Hericleitus.”

“He looks like he’s a bitch...and that’s coming from me.”

“Apparently Michelangelo was.”

Kurt barked out a laugh and then immediately tried to muffle it with his hand. “God, I can only hope one day my bitch face is so legendary that someone feels the need to paint it on the inside of a church.”

“That’s how you know you’ve made it, I guess.”

They both started giggling until someone shushed them, and then they did their very best to be quiet until the group moved to the next room.

“So, Mr. Fun Fact,” Kurt said as they walked. “Got anything else for me?”

“Are you not impressed yet?” Blaine looked at him, trying to purse his lips around his smile.

Kurt raised his eyebrows. “Maybe.”

“I guess I still have a couple of good ones.” Blaine thought for a second. Meanwhile, the group was settling into the line leading into the Sistine Chapel. “There’s a story about how one of Raphael’s buddies offered to sneak him in to see the unfinished Sistine Chapel ceiling—”

“Oh, God. You really do have more.”

“I like the Renaissance. Sue me.”

“Blaine,” Kurt said, and then paused long enough that Blaine looked back over to find him with an expression that was somehow both sharp and concerned.

Blaine frowned. “What?”

“Yesterday you said you were trying to impress me, and then last night…”

Blaine groaned; he had almost forgotten about his embarrassing moment of honesty from the party.

Kurt pushed on. “Do you think that you’re…not _good enough_ to be my friend?”

Blaine blinked at Kurt for a minute. He’d never put the words together in exactly that order before, but it felt true, hearing them now. Was all of his worry about NYU and Pratt really rooted in the feeling that he was never going to dream as big or shine as brightly as Kurt, and that Kurt would eventually suffer from it too? “I mean, kind of.”

“Blaine!” Kurt repeated, now actively frowning. The line shuffled forward minutely as a new group was let into the chapel.

Blaine looked back helplessly. “Kurt. You are special. You’re talented, and fierce and uncompromising and _so incredible_. Meanwhile, I never know what I want, and even when I do I have no idea how to go after it, and if we go to New York together, I’m only going to—”

“ _If?_ ”

“No, I didn’t mean—”

“Whatever." Kurt's tone was a confusing mix of angry and comforting. "Look, if I’m any of those things you said, it is only because I met _you_ during one of the darkest times of my life, and you brought me out of it.”

“That’s not true.”

Kurt scoffed. “Maybe. I still wouldn’t change anything.”

Blaine smiled weakly, feeling tears sting at his eyes. “I wouldn’t either.”

“Besides, you are a thousand things I’ll never be. You’re open and kind and everyone loves you. You’re _so incredible_ too.”

Blaine was crying now, try as he might to hold it back. The line moved forward some more; they would be the next group admitted into the chapel.

Kurt took his hand and squeezed it briefly. “What do I have to do to make you believe me?”

_Never stop holding my hand_ , Blaine thought almost childishly. Instead, he told him, “I’ll let you know if I figure anything out.”

They were quiet until their group was let into the chapel, and Kurt eventually let go of his hand to avoid any looks that they might get.

The chapel was breathtaking—more beautiful than Blaine ever could have imagined. He shuffled towards the center of the floor with everyone else, his neck craned to look at the ceiling. A line from Walt Whitman’s _Song of the Open Road_ occurred to him out of nowhere: _I do not want the constellations any nearer…”_ In this room, it felt like the stars were right up against his face, and he was staring past them into the heavens. He barely noticed when Kurt took his hand again.

“Michelangelo apparently hated painting this thing,” Kurt whispered. “He really wanted to work on his design for the Pope’s tomb, but they kept making him work on different stuff in here.”

“So I’m not the only one who knows about the Renaissance, huh?”

“I know a few things. I know if Michelangelo could see us here, two gay boys holding hands underneath his masterpiece, he would definitely be a lot less sullen than he was in the _School of Athens_.”

Blaine felt like he was hovering out of his body, looking down at himself from the frescoes above. “I guess that makes us pretty special, doesn't it?”

He could feel Kurt looking at him, and there was a smile in his voice when he spoke: “Yeah, I think so.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> These chapters are steadily getting longer--I'm still trying to post once a weekend, and it's worked out that way so far!


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> From Rome to Assisi to Venice

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry this took so long!!! it's super long and a lot happens so maybe that makes up for it? hope you enjoy!!

By the end of their Vatican tour, the seed of a plan had taken root in Kurt’s mind. It began to germinate on the ride back to the hotel, and by the time he was lying next to Blaine in bed that night, he knew for certain that it would bear fruit by the time they left their next destination—Venice.

In the meantime, they went to lunch at an authentic pizzeria (verdict: not better or worse than American-style, only different), and then Dr. Pendergast released them into small, chaperoned groups to explore the city or just do whatever they want. For Kurt, that meant shopping—or at least window shopping—by the Spanish Steps, but he knew it would take some convincing on the part of his group members (excluding Blaine), and so he almost didn’t mention it.

Blaine did, though, casting a subtle glance at Kurt as he explained his own interest in looking around the luxury stores, and he cleverly mentioned that there was a Keats-Shelley museum thing that Nick had mentioned wanting to visit, and so would it be possible for them to hang out in the same area for a few hours, even if they weren’t together the whole time?

Incredibly, and in no small part due to Blaine’s patented Magical Parent Charm, this worked, and their chaperone, David’s mom, led them to the top of the steps, overlooking the Piazza di Spagna, where they decided on a rendezvous point before going their separate ways.

Kurt realized that this was an excellent opportunity for phase one of his plan: cheering Blaine up. After their conversation in the Chapel, it was clear that Blaine could do with a little lighthearted fun.

“I want to _live_ here,” Kurt said as they started to descend the steps. “Not just in Rome—I mean specifically on these steps. This is where Gregory Peck pretended to happen upon Audrey Hepburn and convinced her to spend the day with him in _Roman Holiday_.”

“I remember,” Blaine says, because of course he did. They’d watched that movie together more times than Kurt could count. “Can I be Hepburn this time?”

“I would consider it if you hadn’t insisted on gelling your hair this morning. As it stands, you make a striking Joe Bradley. Come on.” Kurt looped his arm through Blaine’s. “Today’s gonna be a holiday.”

Blaine laughed. “Hang on, that’s my line!”

“Oh, please. You’re lucky I’m not making you be Eddie Albert’s character.”

“Well, then.” Blaine gestured toward the bottom of the stairs. “Shall we?”

Obviously, they didn’t actually descend the steps until they’d taken each other’s pictures sitting where Audrey Hepburn had been in the famous scene. Then, they headed down into the Piazza and picked a street to go down.

They wandered around a little, getting their bearings and just generally revelling in the atmosphere. They spent almost a full hour in the palatial Louis Vuitton boutique, got coffee at a little place on one of the side streets, raced gleefully down the vine-canopied lane where Gregory Peck’s _Roman Holiday_ apartment had been, and all the while Kurt kept an eye on Blaine, looking for signs of melancholy. Thankfully, Blaine seemed to have recovered his spirits, and not even in the way where he was trying to mask how upset he was by roping all of his friends into elaborate musical numbers. They didn’t _not_ sing—their worldviews were both too tied up with the music in their heads—but it was all happy snatches of old crooner songs and silly dance moves and Blaine teaching Kurt a few lines of some Italian songs he knew. It was pure, scenic bliss.

There were a couple of instances where Kurt caught Blaine watching him with an exposed affection that bordered on teary. When that happened, Kurt would reach over and squeeze Blaine’s hand, since apparently they were the type of friends to hold hands now, and give him an encouraging smile before coaxing him into some new activity.

They found themselves at the rendezvous point about ten minutes before the agreed-upon time, feet heavy, swapping bites of gelato in companionable silence. The shadows were lengthening all across the piazza as the afternoon slipped into that magical pre-twilight haze. It was Kurt’s favorite time of day, but in Rome it approached paradise. He knocked shoulders with Blaine, just to express his contentment, and Blaine fixed him with a knowing look. “Thank you for doing this,” he said.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Kurt replied. “Unless you mean the perfect afternoon I just spent with my best friend in the world, which was absolutely my pleasure.”

“I know you’re probably worried about me, after the episode that I had back there, and it means a lot to me that you’re doing so much to cheer me up.”

Kurt grimaced, mildly embarrassed at being caught. “Is it working?” he asked quietly.

“It’s looking like it,” Blaine said. “Too early to tell for sure, though.” He seemed like he was only kind of teasing.

Kurt decided he should insist. “I mean it, though. This has been perfect, and it wouldn’t have been without you.”

“It was perfect for me too. You’re—this whole trip has been a dream.”

“It really has.” Kurt paused and considered his next words. “Blaine, can I ask you—did I do something? Did I do something—or-or did I say something to make you feel this way?”

For a split second, Blaine’s expression broke open, and Kurt knew the truth just as surely as he knew that Blaine would never admit to it. It was gone as quickly as it appeared, and Kurt would have thought he’d imagined it if he didn’t know that face so well.

“No,” Blaine said, and even though Kurt was expecting the lie, it still stung. “It’s just—it’s dumb.”

“It’s not dumb,” Kurt pressed. “Tell me. I want to make it right.”

“You didn’t do anything,” Blaine reiterated. His eyes bored into Kurt’s like he was willing him to fall for it. Like he needed him to fall for it.

Kurt held his gaze for a little bit longer, but Blaine’s intention was unwavering. _God, what could it be?_ he asked himself. What could have made him believe that he was anything less than Kurt’s perfect, attentive, _totally worthy_ best friend?

“Okay,” he said at last, though the matter wasn’t settled by any stretch of the imagination. “Just—whenever you need to talk, I’m—”

Blaine cut him off. “Yeah. I know.” His smile was barely even an attempt.

They were jolted out of the intensity of the moment by Nick and David calling to them from a few yards away. Blaine immediately threw himself into interacting with their friends as the rest of the group assembled, and Kurt let Nick tell him about everything they’d seen and learned in the Shelley-Keats house. He kept half an eye on Blaine the whole time, and Blaine only looked back once.

*

All through dinner and the ride back to the hotel, Kurt wracked his brain for anything he could have said or done in the last few weeks—it couldn’t have been any longer than that, since Blaine was so terrible at hiding his emotions—that could have hurt Blaine. He knew he could be caustic and judgemental, and he kept high walls around his heart, but not with Blaine. He only had one secret from Blaine, and it wouldn’t make sense for Blaine to be insecure about not being good enough if he’d found out about Kurt’s feelings. Just the opposite, right?

That gave Kurt an idea. Sure, he’d have to switch a few wardrobe pieces around and get over two years of built-up fear and insecurity, but telling Blaine his feelings could be the perfect way to remind Blaine of just how wonderful he was in Kurt’s eyes. Maybe the gesture was too big, but this was _Blaine_ , and no one appreciated a dramatic gesture more than him.

So now he had a new plan, and it was much better and more specific than his old plan, which had been kind of the vague idea that he might sneak away with Blaine once they were in Venice. That framework would still do nicely, of course, but now he could plan for something overtly romantic. All through his skincare routine that night, he was distracted by visions of candlelit dinners and moonlight on the canal.

He felt ready to drop into an easy sleep as soon as his head hit the pillow, but beside him, he could feel that Blaine was tense and uncomfortable. Wordlessly, Kurt rolled onto his side and put an arm across Blaine’s chest. Blaine tensed further for a second, but then relaxed and shifted closer so that Kurt’s head fit up against his shoulder. It would probably get too hot for this in about five minutes, but Kurt’s last thought as he drifted off was that he didn’t particularly care.

*

It was definitely too hot to be anywhere close to another human being when Kurt woke up the next morning, drenched in sweat but pressed up against Blaine from knees to chest. The hair at the base of Blaine’s neck tickled his nose, and when Kurt turned his head to get away from it, Blaine groaned and started moving around. That was enough to snap Kurt into wakefulness and force him to the other side of the bed.

Blaine rolled over and arched his back, which popped several satisfying times, before he relaxed and starfished across the bed. He peeked over at Kurt, his eyes the color of polished amber. “Morning,” he said in a low, scratchy voice.

Kurt was overheated for a whole host of reasons now. “Morning,” he returned.

The tension of the moment was mercilessly shattered by Nick, who let out a series of unattractive grunts and nearly rolled off his own bed. “What’s—shit!—how long until we have to be downstairs?”

Kurt checked the clock. Six in the morning. “An hour and a half,” he replied, making devious eye contact with Blaine. On average, Nick was never out of bed more than twenty minutes before breakfast.

“You guys suck,” Nick groaned, and he rolled back over.

“Get up,” Kurt whispered to Blaine. “I want to see the sunrise one last time.”

They didn’t bother getting dressed before slipping out onto the balcony they shared with the room beside them. Blaine was distracting in nothing but his boxers and a thin t-shirt, but not even the cling of the fabric around his thighs could tempt Kurt’s eyes away from the golden expanse of the city before them, still mostly quiet besides a couple of cars on the street below.

“I have a feeling I’m going to say this several more times before we get home,” he said, “but this is my favorite place in the whole world.”

“I know what you mean,” Blaine replied. “It’s unbelievable.”

They leaned against the railing in silence for a few minutes, and the morning breeze against his sweat-sticky skin made Kurt shiver just a little, but he didn’t mind. He turned his face in the direction of the sun and closed his eyes, taking a deep breath and trying to commit everything about this moment to memory.

It occurred to him that this time tomorrow they’d be in Venice. They’d be in Venice, and Blaine would know how he felt. The thought set his pulse hammering in his wrists, and his hands clenched around the railing involuntarily. Whatever Blaine’s response was, there wouldn’t be another morning quite like this one.

Little by little, the city brightened and started to move. After a couple of minutes of this bliss, a particularly strong gust of wind sent a shiver up Kurt’s spine.

Blaine reached out with an inquiring noise, and when Kurt turned to look at him he was looking back with a look that might almost be described as _adoring_. “Are you cold?” he asked.

“Not at all,” Kurt replied. “We should still probably go inside.”

“Probably.” Blaine made no move to return or to break his eye contact with Kurt.

Kurt was about to scrap this whole Venetian nonsense and lean in when they were startled apart by a car alarm that must have been a couple of blocks over. The morning’s peace disintegrated. Laughing, Blaine released a breath and dropped his head down. “We should go inside,” he reiterated, and this time, they both headed for the door to get ready for the long day of travel ahead of them.

As he fished through his suitcase for his specially-appointed traveling outfit, Kurt was filled with a strange certainty that everything was going to work out fine.

*

They took a train from Rome to the hilltop town of Assisi, and though Kurt had brought this month’s _Vogue_ and a couple of books to entertain himself, he spent the whole trip staring out the window. The countryside rolled by, changing from vast, gorgeous fields of wildflowers to brilliant emerald hills, all flying by at lightning speed. Privately, Kurt was still a little mad they weren’t going to Florence—he’d read _A Room With A View_ when he was in the 7th grade and dreamed of kissing his true love in a field of violets ever since—but he was quickly coming to realize that there wasn’t enough time in the world to appreciate this country in the way it deserved. He wanted to explore every inch of it, to wander through its meadows and soak in its cities and not leave until he’d visited every last tiny village on the entire peninsula.

Blaine was sitting across from him instead of next to him, which was probably for the best because otherwise Kurt might do something like grab his hand in plain view of their booth-mates and embarrass everyone. He spent most of his time looking out the window as well, though there were a couple of instances where Kurt caught Blaine watching him like he was somehow just as interesting to look at. Awareness of the attention thrummed through Kurt like a bassline, giddy and inexorable.

Assisi was breathtaking. Unlike Rome, it was quiet and serene, completely free of traffic, criss-crossed with cobbled streets and alleyways—it was ancient and charming in all of Kurt’s favorite ways. After they stowed their luggage, Kurt and Blaine picked up sandwiches from a small butcher’s shop and wandered around aimlessly for the hour of free time they had been allotted before they would tour the Basilica of St. Francis on the far side of the town; apparently, the powers that be had determined that there wasn’t much mischief that the boys could get up to in the sleepy little town, so long as they travelled in pairs. They window shopped and chatted and waved at shop owners for thirty or so minutes until they met up with David, Thad, Nick, and Jeff and continued through the streets in a boisterous pack. Kurt kept an eye on Blaine, but it seemed that the moodiness of the day before had dissolved entirely in the face of such a perfect summer day.

The strangest and most wonderful thing about the city was the facade of an ancient temple to Minerva nestled in between the pale buildings of the Piazza del Comune. According to Nick’s guidebook, it had been converted into a courthouse and then a church during the Middle Ages, but it looked like it would have been at home in the Forum. Kurt took a thousand pictures and wrote down the name in his notebook so he could look it up when he got home and tell his dad all about it. Blaine took his picture leaning up against one of the columns and then took another one with his own phone, claiming that it had a better camera than Kurt’s, but when Blaine got out his phone to prove something to Jeff on the way to the class rendezvous point, Kurt noticed that he’d made the picture his background.

 _So maybe this is just going to work out perfectly,_ Kurt thought. _Maybe it’s been building to this all along, and once I tell him how I feel, we can just_ be together _, and then we’ll move to New York and live in a beautiful apartment in the city and adopt a cat, or even a dog if I’m feeling charitable…_ Kurt stopped himself from getting too carried away, but he couldn’t shake the smile on his face. He was familiar enough with this particular pattern of thinking, and he knew how it always ended, but it was different with Blaine; it had to be. Blaine was actually gay, and Blaine liked spending time with him, and Kurt knew how to make Blaine happy. Maybe this was just a natural extension of everything he already had.

Of course, it wasn’t a completely frictionless afternoon, not with so many Warblers in one place. They were all embarrassing exhibitionists, and once one of them got the idea to sing “Santa Lucia” in the Piazza Santa Chiara, it seemed like nothing would stop them. Kurt could already sense the curious looks of several passers by.

“Come on, guys,” Kurt pleaded. “Can we go one day without doing this?”

“That’s not fair,” Jeff said.

“We didn’t sing at all yesterday,” Nick agreed.

Blaine made a big show of pouting and grasping Kurt’s hands. “You sang with me in the Piazza di Spagna.”

“That was different. We weren’t _performing_.”

“I thought everything’s a performance when you’re Kurt Hummel.” The boys all pointed at Blaine and nodded like he’d made a game-winning point.

“That’s your actual life philosophy,” David added.

Kurt rolled his eyes. “Yeah, yeah. I just—can we enjoy today for what it is without needing to be the center of attention?” After the strangeness of Nick’s midnight serenade, he was more than ready to take some time off from all the melodramatic two-stepping.

The others looked like they wanted to keep arguing, but Blaine held up a hand. “Guys, if Kurt doesn’t want to do this, we don’t have to do it,” he said, but the look on his face belied his own dashed enthusiasm. Kurt felt briefly guilty.

“You should just sing without me,” he said. “I won’t mind.”

“The Warbler Handbook says we can’t sing unless all present Warblers are singing too—” Nick pointed out.

“—except for auditions and pre-ordained solos,” Jeff finished.

“That’s still a really weird rule for a group that gives all their solos to one guy,” Kurt remarked, as much under his breath as he could manage.

“Guys, guys, come on,” Blaine said. “Don’t give him a hard time about this.” He looked over at Kurt. “Are you sure you don’t want to sing?”

Kurt bit his lip and really tried to consider it, but in the end he gave a little nod.

“Sorry, guys.” Blaine turned back to the Warblers. “ _Niente da fare._ ”

There were several good-natured “boo”s at that, but soon they were walking again. Blaine hung back a little bit, and Kurt hung back with him.

“Did you not—I mean—” Blaine paused and took a deep breath. “I thought you liked singing with us.” _With me_ , he did not add, but Kurt knew he meant it anyway.

“I do—God, I do, I swear, it’s just, well.” Kurt tried to think of a way to steer clear of Blaine’s recent insecurities. “I’m still just a little nervous about drawing attention to myself. People can be cruel anywhere.”

Blaine pressed his lips together and ducked his head briefly, but he gave Kurt a sympathetic look out of the corner of his eye. “That makes sense—of course it does. But we’ll always have your back, you know?”

“I know you do. It means the world to me.” Kurt sighed. “I guess I can’t help the trepidation sometimes. Sorry.”

“You don’t have to apologize,” Blaine promised him. “There are plenty of other things we can do to have fun here.”

Kurt watched him carefully for a minute after that, but he genuinely seemed to have let it go. He spent most of the rest of the way to the rendezvous point laughing and goofing off with the others, and Kurt let him, because at the end of the day, they were Blaine’s people in a way that Kurt knew he’d never be. Even if tonight went perfectly, and they ended up—Jesus Christ, how it felt to consider it—in a relationship or something, they would still need space from each other. They wouldn’t suddenly share every interest, every quirk. As he watched Blaine and Thad try to push each other into a nearby fountain, he felt the tension of the exchange leave his body completely.

*

The Basilica of St. Francis felt distinctly different from the Basilica of St. Peter in Rome, and not just because of the size. The air here was somehow clearer, quieter, and the atmosphere more subdued. Kurt could see how someone could feel like this was a sacred place. Based on the look on his face, Blaine was enchanted, too. They didn’t really say anything to each other, and at first Kurt thought there might be some lingering unease, but Blaine kept _touching him_ —his shoulder, his elbow, the inside of his wrist—to get his attention or to make a point or maybe even just to feel close to him in the low light of the vast room. Kurt accepted the touches easily, offering some of his own, looking to Blaine to share smirks and raised eyebrows and awe-filled grins. Silence was always easy with Blaine, much easier than words ever were, and here and now Kurt felt sure that everything he was trying to communicate was perfectly, blissfully clear.

*

The sun was still high in the sky when they got on another train, at last bound for Venice. Kurt tried to stay awake so he could continue watching the scenery flash by, but the warm feeling he’d gotten from the food and the sunshine combined with the last shreds of his jet lag pulled on his consciousness until the vibration of the train finally lulled him to sleep.

He spent the rest of the trip half-waking, half-dreaming in gradient sunshine, listening to snatches of his friends’ conversations and walking through the cobbled streets of his own mind, reaching for a hand to hold, a connection through which to say _isn’t it perfect? couldn’t you wander here for the rest of your life?_

It must have been a few hours later when Kurt woke up to find Nick and Jeff hovering over him excitedly, because the sky was twilit and the train was slowing down. Around him, everyone was shifting—putting away books and papers, pulling down luggage, talking quietly even as the PA system announced the name of their stop.

“Come on,” Nick said. “Blaine offered to corral everyone’s luggage so we can beat the crush.”

“I was asleep?” Kurt asked nonsensically, eyes still heavy from his nap. He was briefly disappointed that Blaine hadn’t been the one to wake him with sweet smiles and gentle touches, but he was also incredibly grateful when Blaine’s forethought meant they were the first ones off the train.

They headed out onto the platform together, and Kurt’s sleepiness vanished in the excitement of once again entering a new and exciting place. The train station was right on the water, and maybe Kurt was imagining it, but he thought he could hear the sounds of water slapping rhythmically against concrete in the distance.

Once the group was together and all accounted for, they piled into water buses (water buses!) to ride to the hotel, and after exactly thirty seconds in the city, Kurt was convinced that this was the greatest and most beautiful place in the whole world. The tightly-packed buildings leaned over the lamplit canals like trees bowing their heads over a country lane, except a billion times more romantic. There were people milling everywhere—having dinner on restaurant patios, passing quickly along the banks of the canal, staring out at the water from the tops of the bridges. It didn’t take long for Kurt to appreciate the absence of cars; the boats were nowhere near as noisy or intrusive, and an overwhelming number of people seemed to be on foot anyway. As they went, Kurt kept a catalog of places it might be fun to take Blaine tonight and started seriously considering strategies for sneaking out.

Their hotel was not that far from the train station, and like most buildings in the city, it had a waterfront entrance, and so the boys filed off of their water buses into the lobby, where they waited for their room assignments. Kurt slipped through the crowd until he found Nick.

“Hey,” he said once he was right behind him.

Nick turned around cheerfully. “Hi, Kurt! You recovered from your nap?”

“Um, yeah, for the most part. Listen, I—”

“You should have seen the way Blaine was watching you,” Nick went on. “He had, just, the most adoring look on his face. You two are so sweet.”

“Uh, thanks,” Kurt said, trying to keep his voice from belying the way Nick’s words—and the implication behind them—set his heart pounding. “That’s actually what I wanted to ask you about. I wanted to, uh, take Blaine out tonight, after dinner, after…”

“Curfew?” Nick filled in with a smirk.

“Exactly.”

“Sneaking out, huh Hummel? I like it.” Nick’s smirk turned sweet. “I bet Blaine will like it too. How can I help?”

“I need a lookout,” Kurt said. Then, a bit sheepishly, he added, “And also someone to show me how you save a map on Google Maps.”

Nick laughed. “Of course. Sit with me at dinner and we’ll plan things out.”

Of course by the time he actually sat down with Nick, at least seven other guys, most of them Warblers, knew about Kurt’s plan, which couldn’t have been good for discretion, but every Dalton man loved a grand gesture, so he knew he could count on their support.

He ate all of dinner at Nick’s table, acutely aware that this was the first meal he’d eaten away from Blaine since the trip started; he wasn’t particularly worried, though, even as he saw Blaine shoot him a couple of glances from across the room. He would make it up to him tonight.

Nick helped him choose a nice place—a quiet restaurant, open late, reasonably priced, and not too far from the hotel. He downloaded the map and the directions, which took up almost all of the remaining space on his phone; he made a mental note to upload some of his pictures to his computer to make more room. Finally, they came up with a plan that was perhaps unnecessarily complicated, but Nick and Jeff were both really into it, and Kurt didn’t want to discourage them.

After dinner, everyone went up to their rooms—Kurt was with Blaine again, since the request form had let them choose each other as room buddies for the whole trip, and they were sharing with Thad and David this time. They were in on Kurt’s plan, of course, and he figured he could put up with all the smirks and not-so-clever innuendos they kept making if tonight went according to plan. Blaine missed most of the jokes, or at least chose to ignore them, and then right on schedule, Thad suddenly really desperately needed to go find an ice machine, and he couldn’t possibly go alone, so Kurt and Blaine were left in the room alone.

“Hey,” Kurt said, very casually, as soon as the door was closed. “Let’s sneak out.”

“Don’t tell me that Nick’s found another girl to serenade already. We’ve only been here a few hours!”

“No, I mean just the two of us. Let’s find somewhere to have dessert, or just walk along the canal, or whatever. See the _real_ city.”

Blaine looked at him incredulously for a moment. “What brought this on?”

“I thought it might be nice. I enjoyed when we snuck out with the guys in Rome, but it was a little much.” Kurt was nailing this casual thing.

Blaine could definitely see through it, though, and he gave Kurt a long, appraising look before he sighed and moved to get up from the bed. “So, where to, huh? I don’t suppose Thad and David are going to be back until they get ‘the signal.’”

“There is no signal,” Kurt shot back, right as his phone chimed with a message from Nick: _All units in position. Operation: Assassins’ Creed II is a go._

Kurt sighed, and Blaine tisked at him as he read the message over his shoulder. “Never let Jeff choose your codenames,” he scolded.

Shoving his phone in his pocket, Kurt rolled his eyes and stood up with Blaine. “We should go,” he said. “We’ve got a very narrow window in which to pull this off, and at the very least I know you’re curious now.”

Blaine followed him out into the hall and down the least complicated route that Kurt could get Nick to agree to. They slipped out into the night unnoticed, and Kurt had to take a minute to appreciate how beautiful Venice was in the dark. The stars were just visible overhead, and there were a million lamps reflecting their light in the gentle water, now approaching high tide. There was barely any noise pollution; Kurt could more feel the ebb and flow of the canal than hear it, like a drum beat guiding men-at-oars. He checked the directions on his phone, somewhat mad that he hadn’t had the time to memorize them, and guided Blaine in the direction of their destination.

“Will you tell me where we’re going?” Blaine asked, though he seemed otherwise content to follow Kurt blindly.

“Would it make a difference if I did?” Kurt shot back playfully. “It’s not like you’ve been here either.”

Blaine paused, considering. “Will you tell me what we’re doing, then?”

“We’re having an adventure.” The street signs were high on the walls of the buildings, and Kurt had to squint to read against the glare of the lamplight. Yep, this was the right street.

“Is it dangerous? Illegal?”

Kurt gave Blaine his best unimpressed look, which was pretty damn good after years of dealing with Rachel Berry. “It wouldn’t be an adventure if it was safe, now would it?”

“Is that a yes to the illegal part too, then?”

“Blaine.” Kurt turned to look at him properly, and got briefly distracted by the way the light reflected off his eyes. They were almost gold.

There was a shift in the air, a current of intensity as deep as the canal. Blaine returned his gaze for a long moment, as if he could feel it too. “Kurt, what are you—?” Blaine asked in a small voice. He didn’t even try to finish his sentence.

Maybe this was the moment. His heart pounded in his ears; he was shaking. He took a breath, willing himself to just _say the words, goddamnit_ , but none came to him. “Come on,” he said eventually, turning towards the path ahead. “We’re almost there.” 

The restaurant was indeed quiet and classy, though that may have been due to the time of night; Kurt’s phone said it was after ten. A waiter led them to a small table in the back corner of the room, next to a large window opening onto the water. There was tasteful accordion music in the background and a candle on the table and everything; if this didn’t set the mood for Kurt to say what he had to say, nothing would.

“Kurt,” Blaine repeated once the waiter had left them with the wine list. “What…?”

Kurt knew he must be completely red now, and how much further was he really going to get without explaining himself?

“Can we just enjoy this for a minute?” he asked, gesturing to the restaurant at large.

Blaine’s expression finally warmed up a little bit. “I guess I can manage that.”

When their server came back, they both acted like they knew how to order wine but asked her to recommend an appetizer—a nifty little trick Blaine learned from his mom for seeming more sophisticated than you were. They demolished the table bread and gossiped about their friends, and it was wonderful and easy and perfect. Every so often, though, Kurt would catch Blaine looking at him with a guarded, curious expression on his face. Kurt could feel the momentum building inside of him; his chest ached with it.

After the appetizer came, they settled into relative silence, and Kurt finally found the words.

“Do you remember the last time we performed with the Warblers?” he began.

Blaine frowned. “Of course.”

“It was amazing, even though it wasn’t for a real audience, and I started crying, so you took me to the side and hugged me until I stopped.”

“Kurt, what does this…?”

“Just let me finish.”

Blaine gestured for him to go on.

“Do you remember how you told me you were scared that you would never get to feel the way you felt when we were singing together ever again?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, I—” Suddenly Kurt realized that what he was about to say was possibly the corniest thing on earth, and he didn’t know if he could go through with it. “I’m scared too,” he forced himself to say. “I’m scared that we’re going to grow up and set off on our lives and I’m never going to feel the way that I feel about you ever again.”

The words hung in the air between them for a moment, and Kurt desperately wanted to grab them all and shove them back into his mouth. Blaine was still frowning at him, like he couldn’t make sense of what he’d said.

For some reason, words kept coming out of Kurt’s mouth. “What I’m trying to say is…”

“Wait,” Blaine interrupts. “Kurt, stop.”

Kurt’s hand clenched in his napkin, and he felt the blood drain out of his face.

“We can’t—I can’t just let you say this and pretend that nothing is wrong. I mean, I want—but—” Blaine sighed to himself and passed his hand over his face.

Kurt wanted to say something, to ask what he was talking about, but he couldn’t. He was shaking.

Blaine looked up at him, and his eyes were shining with tears. “Why didn’t you tell me you got into Pratt?” he asked in a quiet voice.

Kurt’s brain screeched to a halt. “What? Is _that_ what this is about?”

“I know it was your first choice—your dream school—and Rachel told me after graduation that you got accepted, but…you didn’t tell me.” Blaine looked down again while he was speaking and started poking around his plate with his fork.

Kurt was in shock. He had decided against Pratt _weeks_ ago because NYU had offered him a better scholarship; he hadn’t even _thought_ to mention it to Blaine. That explained why Blaine had been vaulting between affectionate and morose for the last few days, though; one look at his face revealed several weeks’ worth of fear that Kurt would leave him, now that Kurt knew to look for it. God, what else had he been misreading?

Blaine was still waiting for him to say something—to explain himself, maybe. “Blaine, I—”

“Were you planning to tell me?” Blaine interrupted in a small voice. “I mean, we had long conversations about college and New York and all our plans, but you never brought it up, and I just feel like this is the type of thing you tell your best friend.”

“I didn’t—I never—”

“And all this time I’ve been asking myself _why_ you didn’t tell me, like, did you think we would just move to New York and I _wouldn’t notice_ you were somewhere else entirely?”

Kurt finally got his wits back. “Blaine,” he said firmly. “I’m going to NYU. I would have told you if I wasn’t.”

“ _Why_ , though?”

“What do you mean, ‘why’?”

“Are you going because of me? Kurt, you can’t—Pratt is—”

“Blaine! Oh my God, it wasn’t because of you, okay?”

“I’m just saying, you have to choose based on what you want, not what you think will make other people happy.”

“Do you think I don’t know that?” Kurt was struggling to keep his voice at a restaurant-friendly volume, but this was getting ridiculous. “NYU offered me a better scholarship package, okay? That’s why I chose them. It’s definitely a plus that you’re going to be there, but I would _never_ make a decision like that because of—because of _some boy._ ”

Blaine flinched as if Kurt had hit him. “Oh,” he said, curling in on himself a little bit. “Of course not. That’s, um—I know that.” He took a shaky breath before pushing himself away from the table and standing up. “I’m going to, uh—” He gestured vaguely towards the back of the restaurant where the bathrooms were, and then he took off.

Feeling kind of shaky himself, Kurt made a sign to the waiter, who immediately brought the check. He gave Kurt a sympathetic look before he hurried off again to make change.

Kurt sighed and put his head in his hands. This was so far from how the night was supposed to go. He was supposed to be holding hands with Blaine while they walked along the moonlit canal, not sitting here alone, feeling angry and ashamed while Blaine made a break for it out of the bathroom window.

Then it occurred to him that Blaine could very well be trying to make a break for it out of the bathroom window, so he threw a tip on the table and started for the bathrooms. He barely made it a handful of steps before he noticed Blaine slipping out of the bathroom and making for the exit. Kurt set after him but didn’t catch up until they were outside.

“Wait!” He tried to grab Blaine’s arm, but Blaine swerved to avoid him and took off down the street. “Where are you going? The hotel is that way.”

Blaine didn’t stop, and eventually Kurt had to start after him so he didn’t lose track of him in the maze of narrow streets. He didn’t want to draw attention to himself by running, but he was walking as quickly as he could, and people were looking at him anyway, since it was clear the boy at the other end of the street was running from _him._

He was surprised when he stumbled upon Blaine just a few minutes later, sitting on the stoop of a long-closed flower shop with his arms folded across the top of his knees. “There you are,” he sighed. “You shouldn’t have taken off like that. How were you going to get back to the hotel?”

“I would have figured it out,” Blaine grumbled.

“Right. Of course.” Kurt sat down next to him on the stoop, and it was awkwardly silent for a moment. He knew he should apologize, but Blaine needed to as well. How could he think so little of Kurt, after all this time? “You were way out of line back there,” he said at last.

“I’m sorry,” Blaine said bitterly. “Did I embarrass you? Classic Blaine, right? Can’t keep it together in public, always has to be the center of attention?”

“I didn’t mean—”

“I mean, it’s obviously not the other guys who you have the problem with—you let Nick and Jeff plan that whole stupid elaborate escape—it’s just me, right? I’m the one you’re embarrassed about, aren’t I?”

“Blaine, how can you—?” 

“You know what? Forget it. How do we get back to the hotel?”

Kurt rolled his eyes and pulled out his phone. He opened the maps app and put in the hotel’s address, but it wasn’t loading. Finally, the error message showed up: OFFLINE: TOUCH TO RETRY. Kurt swore.

“I hope you remember how we got here,” he said, voice shaking. “Because we’re officially off the grid.”

“What?”

“I didn’t save this part of the map. We’re lost.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> obviously I have no idea how Google Maps worked in 2012, so I'm just assuming it worked like it does today. anyway, thanks so much for reading! I'm curious: if you could put a glee-style musical number anywhere in this chapter, where would you put it?


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if you want the full dramatic experience of this chapter (particularly the first half), I would recommend listening to the summer movements of Vivaldi's Four Seasons.
> 
> also I ended up having to split this chapter in half, so the next chapter is going to be from Blaine's pov as well

Blaine resisted the urge to hit something. All he wanted to do was go back to the hotel and fall into bed— _ beside Kurt,  _ the insidious voice in his head reminded him—and sleep off this whole, long, strange day. Had it really been less than 24 hours since he was standing on that balcony with Kurt, watching the sun rise over Rome and considering for the first time that Kurt might feel the same way he did? That hurt to think about now.

He couldn’t quite sort through his feelings at the moment; he needed time and space to do that, and even if Kurt was willing to give him either of those things, he couldn’t exactly do it now. Blaine only knew that he was frustrated and hurt and quite possibly being irrational, though he couldn’t quite bring himself to care about that last one with everything else swimming around in his head and Kurt next to him looking tired and sad and pissed off. He had finally stopped trying to refresh the map on his phone and was staring darkly at the wall opposite them.

“So what do we do?” Blaine asked. “Try to retrace our steps? I—don’t know if I’m going to be all that helpful.” He winced, feeling guilty, but Kurt’s expression didn’t change.

“Well, ideally you wouldn’t have insisted on running off like that. I mean, seriously, Blaine, what were you thinking?”

Hearing Kurt’s tone, Blaine immediately got over the guilt. How could he not understand the way his words had cut against Blaine’s most vulnerable parts? “I was thinking I didn’t really want to be around you,” he snapped. “Honestly, I still don’t.” He knew he was being prickly and unfair, but he thought he sort of had a right to be. It felt like his heart was trying to sink into his lungs.

He felt Kurt tense against the harshness of his words, but only for a moment. Then he was back with bristles of his own. “Well that’s just too bad, because splitting up now is an even worse idea than it was at the restaurant.” He sighed and stood up. “Come on. Let’s at least try to retrace our steps, see if we can get back to the part of the map I have saved.”

Blaine’s first instinct was to childishly stay put, but he really did want to get back to the hotel, even if it meant sharing a bed with Kurt, because at least there he could fake being asleep and be alone with his thoughts. So he got up and led the way back in the direction they’d come.

They walked in relative silence for a few minutes, only speaking to consult each other on whether they’d passed this doorway or that set of windows; the only thing they could really agree upon was that they hadn’t crossed water more than twice. Kurt checked his phone every few minutes to see if the map would load, but it never did, and the longer they wandered, the more sure Blaine was that they were totally lost, and probably only getting further away from the hotel. At least part of it was his fault, since he was too distracted by how awful he felt. If he’d been out of line assuming that Kurt had made his decision about NYU with him in mind, it was only because the most shameful part of him had desperately wanted it to be true. And now, hearing it denied in such direct terms, he felt like he’d been punched in the throat. It wasn’t fair, none of it was fair, and if he could just find a way of telling Kurt about his insecurities without making either of them feel worse than they already did, he could at least stop kicking himself for treating Kurt with so little respect.

Meanwhile, Kurt was getting more and more fidgety the longer they were out. Blaine could understand why. If they got caught coming back, they were screwed, but that was if they ever figured out how to find the hotel again. They might be forced to wander around until someone noticed they were missing and sent out, like, an interpol notice, or some kind of missing persons report. Also, Blaine was sure that he was the last person Kurt wanted to be lost with right now.

“When are the guys expecting us back?” he asked, mostly just for something to say.

“Eleven thirty.” Kurt checked his phone again, and Blaine saw that the display read ‘10:45.’ They had some time before people got worried about them, then. Hopefully it would be enough.

“You really planned to stay out an hour and a half?” Blaine asked.

“Well, obviously I didn’t think to plan for—” Kurt cut himself off. Then, after a beat, he laughed bitterly to himself. “I was worried it wouldn't be  _ enough _ time.”

Blaine didn’t quite know what to say to that. Kurt had told him he  _ liked  _ him, something that Blaine had been dying to hear for ages, but was it enough? Did it matter if he was just  _ some boy _ ? He wanted it to matter so badly.

He walked in silence for a little while longer, trying to string together the right words. Finally, as they were passing a brightly-lit corner store for what Blaine was pretty sure was the third time, he spoke up. “What did you mean, when you said you wouldn’t make a decision because of some boy?”

Kurt startled and stopped in his tracks. He, too, seemed to be choosing his words very carefully. He took a deep breath and let it out through his teeth; Blaine realized he was fuming. “I have things to do, Blaine. Dreams to realize. You do too. We can’t afford distractions.”

“So your feelings—I’m—it’s all just a distraction?”

“I didn’t mean—”

“What’d you mean, then? This is more than a distraction for me, Kurt.”

“Well at the moment it  _ is _ a distraction.” Kurt jabbed at his phone screen. “I have no idea where the hell we are.”

“Jesus Christ, forgive me for wanting to know what’s going on with you!” Blaine wanted so badly to stay calm, stay focused on having a mature conversation, but it felt like his heart was  _ bleeding. _ “Oh, wait, I’m doing it again, aren’t I? Making it about me, embarrassing you,  _ distracting  _ you?” Blaine was shaking now; he couldn’t decide whether or not he wanted Kurt to deny the accusation.

“Blaine—”

He couldn’t help it. He was caught up in the rhythm of performance, digging his own, self-loathing grave with a fervor he usually reserved for the stage. “I’m sorry, am I making a scene again? I guess I should just go f—”

“Stop it!” Kurt snapped. It was the first time he’d raised his voice since he’d found Blaine on the stoop of the flower shop, and it attracted attention from several of the people sitting outside a nearby restaurant. Kurt blushed and pulled Blaine into a quiet side street. “Listen to me. I’m sorry about what I said. But I need you to understand that I am not some naive kid making stupid choices because I think my life is some kind of fairy tale.”

“I never said you were.”

“Then why was your first assumption that I was giving up on something I wanted because of my feelings for you?”

_ Because I wanted it to be true. Because if I were you, I would have been tempted to do the same. _ “I don’t know,” Blaine settled on, because it was easier than the truth.

Kurt scoffed. “Well, figure it out. And don’t blame me for whatever hero complex you can’t seem to get over.”

“What  _ hero complex _ ?”

“Oh, please. You like rescuing people. I appreciated it when I was someone who needed rescuing.” Kurt turned on one heel and stormed down the street, now as blindly furious as Blaine had been when he got them lost in the first place.

Blaine caught up with him easily, but didn’t dare reach out to stop him. “I don’t think you need—”

Kurt kept moving, rounding a corner at random and avoiding Blaine’s eyes. “And it’s so funny, you know, because I’m the one who’s spent the last few days taking care of you when you were all mopey, even though you refused to tell me why.” Finally, he turned to look at Blaine. “Honestly, between the two of us, I really don’t think I’m the one making bad decisions based on my emotions.”

“Kurt—”

“I’m serious, Blaine. It’s fine if you don’t have everything figured out, but I know what I want, and I don’t need anyone second-guessing things they know nothing about.” He took off again—another random turn, another block taken at a clip, and then suddenly the street opened up in front of them and they were standing at the edge of Saint Mark’s square.

It was so vast and beautiful and bright that it brought Blaine up short, making him feel impossibly vulnerable and small. Kurt took a few more steps but when he looked up, he fell equally thunderstruck. “God,” he whispered, barely loud enough for Blaine to hear. “Oh my God.”

Blaine was trembling, and for a moment he forgot how to breathe. At the far end of the piazza, the basilica was floodlit, shining golden almost as if it was the middle of the afternoon. The clocktower loomed darkly in the foreground, and just behind it, he could see a corner of the Doge’s Palace.

Kurt looked back at him with wide eyes and parted lips. It was a shadow of so many moments they’d shared over the last few days, when, confronted with unimaginable beauty, all either of them wanted was to share it with the other. Kurt reached out to him, almost like he couldn’t help it, and Blaine reached back. Kurt’s grip was death-tight as he turned back to the sight in front of them, but Blaine could only watch the way the light reflected in his eyes. He took a shaky step forward, pulling Kurt towards him as he did, and before he could even think about it, his free hand was brushing Kurt’s cheek. He glanced down at his mouth before letting his eyes flicker closed, and he leaned forward until a hand on his shoulder stopped him.

“Blaine,” Kurt breathed. Blaine opened his eyes to find Kurt squeezing his own eyes shut, like what he was doing took considerable effort. “Don’t.”

Blaine released Kurt’s hand and took a step back, feeling like he’d come back into his body for the first time since they’d stepped into the piazza. Kurt made an aborted move to follow him and then clenched his fists at his sides.

“I’m sorry,” Blaine said, his voice husky and foreign-sounding. “I—that was—”

“Yeah,” Kurt agreed, to what Blaine couldn’t guess. They looked at each other for a long, tense moment, and then Kurt took a small step backwards. “We need to find the hotel.”

“I could…ask someone, um.” Blaine swallowed, feeling stupid that he hadn’t offered before, and also sort of like his tongue was made of soap. “I know enough Italian for that. Do you remember the name of the hotel?”

Kurt nodded and let Blaine lead him further into the square, where they found someone who looked like a waiter getting off shift and asked if he could tell them how to get to the  _ Santa Croce _ district.

The walk back to the hotel took nearly twenty minutes and passed in complete silence. Kurt was tense and restless; Blaine was pretty sure that he’d started crying at one point, but it was too dark to know for sure. Meanwhile, Blaine’s anger and desperation had completely faded away, and he was left swimming in regret for the things he’d said about Kurt and their friendship. And then he’d tried to kiss him—what kind of  _ idiot  _ pulled a stunt like that? “I’m sorry” wasn’t even going to begin to cover this one. He had been so swept up in the romance of the ambiance that he hadn’t been paying attention to what Kurt wanted. He suddenly remembered the Karofsky incident, and his brain nearly went into catatonic overdrive.

A voice in the back of his head, which sounded surprisingly like Kurt’s, stopped him before he could melt down completely, reminding him that unlike Karofsky, he had stopped when Kurt said no. Everything else was forgivable, if embarrassing.

The real Kurt froze next to him once they came in sight of the hotel and swore for the second time that night. Blaine looked over at him. “Kurt?”

Kurt groaned and pinched the bridge of his nose. “The guys are going to be so weird about this.”

Blaine grimaced. Their friends had watched him pine after Kurt—and vice versa, it would seem—for months. At the very least, they would be excited and a little pushy, but he wouldn’t be surprised if they had put money on this; the only silver lining was that it was too late at night to stage a public serenade. “Probably, yeah. Do you want me to go in first?”

Kurt’s eyebrows shot up, and he looked like he was considering it. Then he sighed and dropped his shoulders. “Their pity might actually be worse. Let’s just get this over with.”

They slipped back in and took the back stairs up to their room, since Nick’s re-entry plan was apparently a lot simpler than his exit plan, and they almost made it into their room without incident. At the last minute, though, Blaine heard a door opening next to him and felt himself being dragged away from a startled Kurt, one pair of cold hands covering his eyes while another pulled him by his shoulders.

Once he was inside the room—it must have been Nick and Jeff’s room, because they turned out to be the ones who had grabbed him—he jerked away from his abductors and lunged for the door, but Jeff was blocking him. “What the hell?” he snapped. Why couldn’t they just let him go to bed?

“We know you probably want to spend time with Kurt right now,” Jeff said, bouncing his eyebrows suggestively, “but we wanted the details first.”

“Besides,” Nick chimed in, “Thad and David are still in there, so you wouldn’t be able to do anything.”

“Nick!” Despite his bad mood and the truth of the situation, Blaine felt a twinge of indignation at the implication that he would be anything less than a gentleman with Kurt.

Nick, of course, misinterpreted this. “Relax, man, they’re going to leave eventually—”

“No, you guys—”

“First, you have to tell us  _ everything. _ ”

Blaine sighed heavily and sat down on the closest bed.

“That’s not a good sign,” Jeff pointed out.

“We had a fight,” Blaine said.

“Dude.” Nick sat down next to Blaine on the bed. “I know Kurt’s got a temper, but you’ve only been together for like an hour and you’re already fighting?”

“We’re not together.” Why was that so hard to say? It wasn’t like they’d been together before. “He told me, or started to tell me he had feelings for me, and I just—there were things that I was upset about—and I couldn’t—I mean, I couldn’t believe it, first of all, and I wanted it to be the best thing that had ever happened to me, but I also couldn’t bring myself to accept it when I thought he was keeping these other things from me.” Blaine leaned over and braced his forehead on the heels of his hands. “It turned out to be a stupid misunderstanding, but I said some things that were terrible and unfair, and he said, well—I guess his things were kind of terrible too, or they made me feel terrible, and—” He cut himself off with another long sigh.

Jeff sat down on his other side. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“Not right now. Thank you though.”

Jeff clapped a hand on Blaine’s shoulder and squeezed briefly; somehow that was exactly what he needed, as opposed to the hug he might have gotten had Kurt been the one comforting him. Just a simple, fortifying touch, and he felt a million times better, or at least good enough to return to the room and face Kurt.

Kurt was in the bathroom when Blaine got back, and he immediately noticed that Kurt’s things were on the other side of the room. Now his bag, his iPod, and his silk pillowcase were neatly resting where David’s things had been when they left this morning, and all of David’s stuff had been shoved in the general direction of the bed Blaine and Kurt had shared. Thad and David both gave him looks that were somehow sympathetic and disapproving at the same time; he wondered what version of events Kurt had told them. Instead of asking, though, he flopped face-down onto the bed and willed himself not to start crying until someone turned out the lamp.

Sharing a bed with David was very different from sharing one with Kurt; for one thing, David was known to kick in his sleep, and he got Blaine square in the back of the knee twice around 4 AM. Also, though, Blaine knew there was no risk of waking up with David’s arms around him like Kurt’s had been that morning in Rome. There would be no shy looks across the pillows before they got out of bed. Blaine’s whole body ached with longing.

He could tell that Kurt wasn’t asleep either; he heard him turning and readjusting his pillow and huffing angrily at something more than once. A part of Blaine wanted to call out to him, but there was more than one reason why he shouldn’t. It was going to be a long night.

*

Blaine woke up late the next day and didn’t have time to do his hair, but he realized quickly that it was for the best, because Venice was humid as a swamp, and the gel wouldn’t have made that much of a difference. At breakfast, he sat with Nick and David while Kurt was across the room with Thad and Jeff, and he was almost positive that he saw Nick pocketing a piece of paper with the heading KLAINE SEATING ROTATION as he got up to get his second cup of coffee.

Their first stop for the morning was a glassblower’s workshop in Murano; Blaine had never been more afraid of breaking things in his life. Everything around him was sparkly and beautiful and impossibly delicate, and even though he was neither big nor bumbling, he still felt like every little movement might start a catastrophic domino effect that ended with his arm full of broken glass and his parents out thousands of dollars. The anxiety is unbearable, especially after a night of basically no sleep, and so as soon as the demonstration was over, Blaine hurried to the top floor of the shop, which was decorated with gorgeous carnival masks and almost certainly meant as a holding pen for unruly children. David joined him, and they tried on masks together for half an hour without intending to buy anything, except half an hour later, Blaine was climbing onto the vaporetto with a carefully-wrapped cat mask in a bag slung over his arm.

He ended up in a seat across the aisle from Kurt, who gave him an inscrutable once-over. He tried to think of something to say, anything, but everything that came into his head sounded either desperate or completely moronic. He sighed and folded into himself a little more.

Logically, he knew that it wouldn’t be like this forever. They’d fought before, and it’d been awkward, but they were always back to banter and gossip in less than a week. This time couldn’t be that different, right?

Right?

They didn’t talk or sit near each other during lunch, and Blaine caught two more definite glances of the seating rotation chart, which was perhaps unnecessarily elaborate. Did their friends really think this was that serious? He thought back to his conversation with Nick and Jeff last night, how exhausted and sad and closed-off he’d been, and figured that maybe they had reason to.

After lunch was a gondola tour, which would have been relaxing, probably, if Kurt had not been sitting across from him in their boat. Nick and Thad were there too, but they were both too uneasy to start a conversation, their eyes going back and forth between Kurt and Blaine like they thought something terrible might happen at any moment. Blaine spent the ride pretending to look out at the buildings they were passing while trying to ignore that Kurt’s knee was inches from his own. Normally he could have distracted himself with the drunken gondolier's song, maybe joined in with a cool harmony, but he felt almost cripplingly self-conscious, a feeling that he didn’t usually associate with singing. He knew that he’d been unfair when he’d accused Kurt of being embarrassed of him the night before, but Kurt himself had asked them not to sing in Assisi, so Blaine still felt like he needed to prove he could go more than a few hours without making himself the center of attention. And so he stayed quiet, bored, watching the waves against the side of the boat and half-listening to Nick as he read to them from his guide book about the neighborhood they were in.

They passed the Piazza San Marco, but not too closely; Blaine caught a flash of gold from the front of the basilica and little else.

By the time supper was over, he was ready to admit that not talking to Kurt sucked more than just about anything, and even if none of his apologies felt sufficient, surely any one of them was better than nothing at all. As they were walking back from the restaurant, he hung back to try his luck with Kurt.

“Hey,” he said gently, as soon as his approach had made Jeff shamelessly scramble away.

“Hi,” Kurt said in a small, clipped voice.

“I need to apologize to you.”

Kurt raised his eyebrows but didn’t say anything.

“I’m sorry about last night,” he began, because that was as good a place as any to start. “I shouldn’t have run away and gotten us lost, and I shouldn’t have—I shouldn’t have tried to kiss you.”

Kurt frowned. “That’s what you’re gonna apologize for?”

“I mean, shouldn’t I be?”

“While I admit your timing was less than ideal, and yeah, you really shouldn’t have taken off like that, but the, uh, in the piazza, that was—well, it wasn’t the worst part of the evening. Not by a long shot.” Kurt looked vaguely uncomfortable saying the words, and Blaine realized he meant them as a sort of confession.

“Oh. Um, for me too.”

Kurt sighed. “Is that all?” He didn’t wait for an answer, shouldering past Blaine to catch up to the group.

“No!” Blaine said, perhaps too loudly. “I mean, uh—if it wasn’t the kiss, then what? I still want to fix this.”

That shocked Kurt into a laugh, bright and bitter. “Oh, come on. If you have to ask it doesn’t count as an apology, does it?”

“I’m serious, Kurt. Not talking to you...it kind of sucks.”

Kurt huffed and crossed his arms. “Give it your best shot, then. Apologize.”

It was a trap. Blaine knew it was a trap, that Kurt was baiting him, that he expected to be disappointed by whatever Blaine’s answer was. Still, he couldn’t stop the response from flying off his tongue. “I’m sorry I got mad at you for not telling me about Pratt. Your decision is your business, and I shouldn’t have pushed you.”

Kurt’s gaze hardened. “Thanks for playing, I guess.”

“Wait, no—I’m sorry I’ve been weird and moody, and that I said what I did about you choosing NYU because of me, and—”

“Can you just drop it, Blaine?” Kurt finally snapped. He took a breath and closed his eyes, and when he opened them again, they were cold and frustrated and a little disappointed. “I…hear you, I guess, but what you said hurt.”

“I’m sorry,” Blaine repeated, and even he could tell he was getting annoying. “Tell me what I can do to make it right.”

“Honestly, I would feel better if we just dropped it. This is our last chance to be with our friends like this, and all I ever wanted was for it to be perfect.”

“Yes, okay, of course.”

“Good.” They had reached the elevators in the hotel, and Kurt reached out to squeeze Blaine’s hand. “I hated not talking to you too.”

*

Blaine slept a lot better that night, even though he was still sharing with David. It was in part due to the fact that he was genuinely exhausted after the poor sleep he’d gotten the previous night, but mostly it was because he was newly determined to give Kurt the most perfect last half of a vacation anyone had ever had.


End file.
